


all my nightmares escaped my head

by hipsterophelia



Category: Cloud Atlas - All Media Types, Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 20:46:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4034017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hipsterophelia/pseuds/hipsterophelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was far from ultimate. All of it was. Maybe that was what made it so distinctive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all my nightmares escaped my head

He has a recurring dream of running up a staircase, but his legs seem to be made out of lead - out of something heavier than that - and Sixsmith never reaches the right floor, is interrupted by a sound so loud it seems to alter reality. He wakes up sweating, trembling, fumbling for a breathing body there beside him. The bed is empty, the sheets as cold as winter. He can not reach the third floor and it should be relief because he knows very well what waits up there. The thought of never having to see that sight again, if nothing else, should be enough to calm him down; but if he never can, then it all adds up to that he will never see his face again.  
      
There are few photographs in the bookshelf, but it does not quite match it. They are captured in this very room, a relic from a pale November day when Robert all of sudden was in possession of a camera; eight pictures from that morning, carefully hid behind a row of books that he seldom reads, just so that he never will have to stumble upon them by accident.  
  
He was still himself there; a favourite picture - Frobisher in profile, lightning a cigarette, glancing into the camera either way, smiling. He should be remembered like that, would have wanted to be remembered like that. But no matter how long he stares at that picture, how hard he tried to put every single angle of his face, down to his memory, it all returns to the same scene. He was not himself there, not the person Sixsmith once knew; smaller, more vulnerable than he ever was in life. You can never truly change a person. You can control their actions, the way they behave and hold themselves to the world, later on, you can alter the memory of them, but you can never truly change who they are. It was far from ultimate. All of it was. Maybe that was what made it so distinctive.  
  
The letters are there too, hidden as well as the photographs; a correspondence starting with shorter notes from the late twenties, more anxious ridden letters from the early thirties when Frobisher somehow managed to be everywhere and nowhere, all at once, then pages and pages from Belgium, dated 1931, and then, an abrupt ending. It took a while before he could bear to read the last one of them, but he had done it - had read it and then regretted it immediately.  
  
He knew what would come. Knew exactly what would be waiting for him behind that door. Rushing up for those stairs, he wished he could relive those last few moments, wide-eyed and free, wished he could have held on to it all before it scattered. Would have kept on running forever if he could, everything not to reach that door. But then it swung open and the bathroom door was still closed but he knew. _He is gone, he is gone, he is gone_ \- it echoed through him as he crossed the room, discarding those last shreds of hope. It all shut down after that; life turned into trembling, grasping hands, the centre of the universe a bathtub in a Belgian hotel-room.  
  
He went back to his room and slept although it was barely dusk. When he woke up in the middle of the night and it all felt so surreal that it could not possibly be anything but a nightmare and he waved it of a such, but of course, he knew better as his eyes adjusted to the dark in the lavish hotel room and then realisation hit and... It was somewhere there he read the letter for the first time; in some sort of strange hope it would give him a single of proof of this being mere imagination. A hope that was ruined within the first sentence. _Sixsmith, shot myself through the roof of my mouth at 5 a.m. this morning with V.A.’s Luger._ He had heard the gun, for God’s sake, he had held him as the last warmth left this body, how on earth could it be anything else than reality?  
  
Then the guilt came, as he sat on the floor, fumbling for something that he could not - can not - hold again; as he read that last letter over and over; as he went further back, reading all of the letter that he had been sent from Bruges during those months. It turned into a noose as he paced across the room, imagining everything that he would undo if he could; everything he had done wrong, the unseen consequences of his actions. He would be willing to pay the hangman to make it stop.  
  
He spent weeks barely leaving his hotel room; Christmas came and went as he sat there, wishing death upon Vyvyan Ayrs, wishing death upon everyone who brought on this destruction, wishing death upon himself because how on earth do you go on with living after _we do not stay dead long_ and _I’ll be waiting for you there_?    
\- He still does not know, but he returns to Cambridge in early February, back to his room where nothing has changed although everything is different. Outside his window people are moving on with their lives as if reality had not been scattered and he had never even reconsidered what being lonely truly felt like, until there and then. But he lives, apparently. Sometimes it feels as if it is only briefly, but he gets by. Manages to keep his head up even though he only wants to sink. There are days when he wakes up in the morning and does what he shall, there are nights when he does not even consider what could have been.  
  
Months slips into nothingness as he tries to be angry with Frobisher; wants to be angry just to feel something. Just so that there would be anything else than the feeling of despair that is slowly turning into something mundane. Truth be told, there is nothing to be angry about. Frobisher was many things, but he was not selfish, not matter how hard he tried to seem careless. And it was not selfish, it never was - it was what he wanted, and Robert getting what he wanted was not unusual, nor unexpected. Stubborn, not selfish - to concepts easily mixed up. _What is truly selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence._ And it is not that Sixsmith blames him; it is the aftershocks, the way the world keeps on spinning even though it feels as if it has stopped. It stopped months ago.

Two more months passes by in a vacuum. There is a note in the newspaper on the 16th of April, announcing the death of Vyvyan Ayrs. It does not feel half as good as he expected that it would.  
  
The left side of the bed still smells just like him. Impossible, that a smell would remain for so long, but it is there, probably just as a part of Sixsmith’s imagination by now, he knows this, finds it soothing nonetheless; he embraces it, terrified of forgetting He has lost so much already - not the way Robert looked, not exactly, but that is way he looks in photographs, how he would look if someone made a portrait of him, and therefore it is not the parts that he is scared to forget; sooner it is his gestures as he spoke, his expression as he was fully focused on music. The sound of his voice. The shape of his hands. It will be gone. All that he loved about him will be gone.  
  
He has a recurring nightmare of running up a creaking hotel-stair, but his legs won’t work and he will never reach the right landing in time and then there is a gun shot and he hates himself, for not even in the world of dreams can he make this right.  



End file.
